The sweet deal between the San Diego Community College District and developers Mike Madigan and Paul Nieto has moved beyond malodorous to ethically and legally questionable. For everybody's sake, the facts must be sorted out by District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis' Public Integrity Unit.

The Legislature has missed the deadline for adopting a 2007-08 state budget after managing to accomplish the task last summer. As in past showdowns, the media's impatience with Republicans who won't just give the Democratic majority what it wants could not be more plain. One account depicted the GOP's push for $2 billion less in spending – so the “operational” budget would balance – as a squabble over a “fraction” of state spending.

They say you can't please all of the people all of the time, but San Diego's Charter Review Committee is doing its level best to accomplish just that. Responding to criticism that its daytime public hearings at City Hall were inconvenient for many people with jobs, the panel has revamped its meeting schedule.

Our course in Iraq has lost contact with our vital national security interests in the Middle East and beyond. Our continuing absorption with military activities in Iraq is limiting our diplomatic assertiveness there and elsewhere in the world.

Whether Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he wants to wipe Israel off the map is still contested, even by anti-mullah Iranian-Americans. But that he wants to wipe out the Jewish state, there can be no doubt. As he completes his visits to every Iranian town, the collection of his pronunciamentos is edifying reading.

The people who call themselves the Minutemen claim to be a cross between a law enforcement auxiliary and a giant neighborhood watch program that patrols the border to stop illegal immigration. If so, there goes the neighborhood. The Minutemen don't just construct their own reality. More and more, they account for their own reality show.